The Challenge of Simplicity - Part Two

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” That’s true for nutrition drinks as well, found the Team that developed BOOST® Simply Complete™ drink.

In The Challenge of Simplicity - Part One, we delved into the first two of the four challenges that the BOOST® Simply Complete™ team faced in creating a simple drink. In part two, we cover challenges three and four:

BOOST® Simply Complete™ development challenges

Challenge #3: List of Food Ingredient Names is Confusing

Although consumer interest in food labels is increasing with the clean food label trend,1 there is still a lack of understanding when it comes to what the list of food ingredient names actually are. Vitamins are sometimes listed by their full chemical name on a food label. So, why not just say Vitamin E and be done with it?

The problem is that some vitamins, like Vitamin E, come in different forms and therefore the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require that the full chemical name be used on the food label. “This is where I think consumers start to get confused because especially in a nutritionally fortified product like what we have, these vitamins and minerals, they’re all chemical-sounding names,” according to Matt Hooper, the Regulatory Representative on the team. “We try to keep things as simple as possible for the consumer where we can, but we are fully committed to adhering to all government regulations when it comes to our food label.”

Joe Rupnow, the Research & Development Representative on the team, echoes the need to keep the list of food ingredient names simple when discussing the decision not to use the term “evaporated cane juice,” instead of “cane sugar” on the BOOST® Simply Complete™ food label. “From a marketing perspective, it sounds better not to use the word sugar, but if we can make it simpler for the consumer to understand, we need to put it that way on the food label,” he says.

Challenge #4: The Need To Balance Great Taste and Nutrition

No matter how simple a product is, if it doesn’t taste great, it will be left on the store shelf. The Nestlé Health Science team worked hard to ensure BOOST® Simply Complete™ drink would be delicious while maintaining a shorter list of ingredients and upholding the company-wide initiative of lowering sugar in all products.2 “If you have a product that’s really high in sugar, it might taste good, but that’s going to conflict with the goal to have a simple, nutritious product,” says Abby Klosterbuer from the Nutrition Translation team, which is responsible for the overall “design” of the product.

In order to achieve good taste with fewer components, the company focused on finding the right balance of natural flavors and decreased sugar content. “We spent about a year testing approximately 30 different variations of flavors like vanilla bean and dark chocolate trying to get it right,” says Stephanie Williams of the Sensory Department.

Products like BOOST® Simply Complete™ drink might have uncluttered packaging and a short ingredient list on its food label, but it was anything but simple to develop and commercialize it. As Rupnow puts it, “It’s kind of like what Mark Twain said, he didn’t have time to write a short letter so he wrote a long one instead.”